Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday January 23, 2014 @06:50PM
from the waiting-for-the-big-one dept.

sciencehabit writes "The occasional quakes rattling the New Madrid Seismic Zone, a series of Midwestern faults named for a small town in the Missouri Bootheel, aren't aftershocks of the massive quakes that rocked our fledgling nation more than 2 centuries ago, a new study suggests. In other words, modern-day quakes are signs that the faults in the region are still accumulating stress—and sometimes releasing it as fresh rumblings."

Seriously, who writes this stuff? I remember a minor earthquake we had in Michigan in the mid-80s. Why would they suddenly stop? Geological activity occurs over geological time scales, which is to say, thousands, even millions of years.

Well it could be. But you've just demonstrated the difference between faith and science. You have faith that fracking is bad and thus ascribe to it all manner of devilry. Meanwhile scientists collect and study the data, trying to eliminate theories, rather than just seizing onto one charismatic idea to cherish and hold as the One True Faith.

The Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old, or about 1/22,500,000th older than it was when the last major earthquake hit in New Madrid.

For comparison, that's like being surprised that the US is roughly the same as it was 5.5 minutes ago.

Other fun Deep Time trivia: if the entire Earth's history were compressed into a 24 hour day, with the start being midnight yesterday and the current time being midnight tonight, then its surface was overrun with dinosaurs at 11:40PM. Modern Man came on the scene around 11:59:56PM.

That said, there is a statistical incidence that wants to correlate heavy fracking with earthquakes. Whether the New Madrid is just unstable, or becoming unstabilized with mounting fracking is unknown. The statistical correlation between seismic movements and fracking remains, however.